Both your XP and your NC are published on your home node. They are publicly viewable. That means you can calculate your own SNF, and the SNF of other noders, and see how you measure up. The simple node-fu is the only objectivemeasure you have because the variables of the compound node-fu are generally known only to each noder personally.

While not available to level 1 noders (easily correctable with the above point), this actually favors less experienced noders who may not have enough experience to judge the quality of their own write-ups. Every day you use up all your votes, your XP increases by half the votes you had (that is in addition to any other XP you have earned while voting). Why does it favor lower-levelnoders? Because, believe it or not, it is easier to cast 20 votes in a day than 60, or 100, or even more.

E2 recognizes this. If you go through your own write-ups and find the ones likely to be killed, and post an E2 Nuke Request, your write-up will be deleted. That's different from killed. You will receive no penalty. Hence, you will increase your node-fu (and diminish the risk of having the write-up killed, which would decrease your node-fu.

Your HC is your help count. It is the total number of days, within the last ten days that you helped somebody else to node better:

You have /msged someone about a spelling error politely, and he actually corrected the error;

You have /msged someone (again, politely) with a suggestion on how to improve his node, and he followed through;

You have helped a less experienced noder by answering his question in the Chatterbox (and, no, RTFM, does not count here).

Things like that. Your HC is the total number of the last ten days you did that (even if you did it more than once in a day, count the day only once). Hence, your HC can be anywhere within 0 and 10. You can give yourself less than 1.0 for a day you helped a little but could have helped more. Remember, this is for your own self-evaluation. If you cheat, you're only cheating yourself.

Your BC is your borg count for the last ten days. If you were never borged within the last ten days, your BC = 0. If you were borged a thousand time within the last ten days, your BC = 1000. It can be anything between 0 and infinity (well, actually, there is an upper limit since you can only be borged once in 10 minutes or so).

Page category:

Evaluating Simple Node-Fu and Write-up Node-Fu:

The Simple Node-Fu (SNF) and the Write-up Node-Fu (WNF) are both based on
calculating an average of the mean of a given dataset. In the SNF
calculation, this dataset is the accumulated XP and as Pike already
pointed out, this also includes XP collected through voting.

Indeed, in order to evaluate your node-writing ability, it
may be better to evaluate the accumulated reputation of all the
write-ups. At first, it seems fair to evaluate the reputation
by calculating the average of the mean:

Mean reputation = Σr / NC

Where Σr is the sum of all the write-up reputations, and NC is
the total node count.

However, examination of the Range (defined as Highest Rep -
Lowest Rep) of the write-up reputations shows that there is
generally a big gap between the highest and lowest valued write-up. In my
case it is currently 29, but more extreme examples are plentiful. Since the write-up
reputations are so widely spread around the mean, the mean
reputation is not the correct measure for a person's node writing
ability.

More definitive evidence on the wide spread of the node reputations comes from calculating the standard
deviation of Σr. The standard deviation describes how widely
spread the sample reputations are from the mean. My write-ups have a
mean reputation=4.0, with a (sample) standard deviation=4.6.
This is a huge standard deviation, especially considering that
the standard deviation is actually larger than the magnitude of the
mean. No doubt other noders have similar statistics.

Since Pike's calculation of WNF is also based on a mean write-up
reputation (with a correction for C!'s), this method incorporates the
same inaccuracies that are introduced due to the wide spread of node
reputation. Nodes with a high reputation have a dramatic influence on
the accuracy of the WNF.

Median Node-Fu (MNF):

The problem of wide distributions around the mean is often
encountered in statistics. In these cases, the median is a better
measure of central tendency. The median is the midpoint of a
distribution; half of the observations are below the median, and half
are above it. For example: family income for a country or region is
usually listed at the median, since families with very high or low
income can have a large influence on the mean.

Since the median is less affected by extreme scores (very low-, or
high-reputation write-ups), I propose the use of an alternative index,
the Median Node-Fu (MNF). It is calculated as follows:

Where {(NC-1)/2} is the median node count (e.g. it is
124 for a user with 250 write-ups), and username is the user you
want to calculate the WNF for. Continue with steps 5 and 6.

Discussion:

MNF is low:

The Median Node-Fu will generally be lower than the SNF
or WNF, simply because it is not affected by extreme write-up
reputations.

Another interesting observation is that the accuracy of the MNF
increases with increasing number of write-ups. Even though the range of
write-up reputation can become very large, it has no effect on the
MNF.

C!'s:

Unlike SNF and WNF, the MNF is independent of C!'s. The reason is that
C!'ed write-ups are already rewarded through longer exposure on the
front page. Good write-ups will receive all the votes they deserve.

"MNF never goes up"

The Median Node-Fu will certainly go up, but it requires a
significant amount of high quality write-ups. On average, your new
write-ups need to gain higher reputation than your MNF. Also, take a
look at low-reputation write-ups and improve them.

Final Remarks:

Use this index only as a personal measure of your write-up
quality, not as a measure to compare to others. The point is not to be
better than someone else; it is to become better than you were. However, since an Everything's Best Users ranking is apparently part of the game, please see Median Node-Fu Product for a further analysis.